A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving With More Skill and Less Pain

Some common directions into which people tend to lose neutral joint position during movement are upper cervical extension, thoracic flexion, scapular elevation and internal rotation, thoracolumbar extension, hip flexion, and foot pronation.

Movement quality is also what helps elite performers stay free of injury. If you train hard enough to get good at anything, you will put your body under a tremendous amount of mechanical stress. Efficient movement helps one avoid injury by minimizing and distributing the mechanical stress of movement.

The parts of your brain that control movement are linked to the parts that control thoughts, emotions and sensory perceptions. If you want to change your emotional or mental state, and indeed your self-image, changing the way you perceive and move your body is one way to go about it.

For example, to increase performance and reduce injury, it is generally true that the mechanical stress of movement should be shared by many joints, as opposed to highly concentrated in one joint.

another key factor in performance is simply learning to take the foot off the brake. Driving with the brake means you don’t go anywhere very fast and you damage your car in the process. Similarly, inefficient movement can slow you down and stress the body at the same time.

Posture is really just another form of movement — it takes skilled and coordinated work of the muscles and proper positioning and alignment of the joints. Further, posture always involves some small degree of movement — breathing, oscillations around a center point, turning the head from side to side, etc. Because the quality of posture is determin

Pain is a real feeling, but that feeling does not necessarily reflect real damage in the body. Further, although pain depends on brain activity for its existence, this does not mean you can simply think pain away or that pain is your fault. Unfortunately, the processes which create pain are mostly unconscious and outside your control.

A coordinated joint is necessarily a safer joint. Just as you wouldn’t move quickly in a basement with poor lighting, your brain doesn’t want to move joints quickly and powerfully without a good map of the joint.

Graded exposure is the progressive introduction of threatening movements or other stimuli, in the right dosage and timing, which causes the nervous system to become less threatened by the movements. In other words, if you painlessly perform a movement that used to hurt, your nervous system will find that movement less threatening in the future.